Study note
on academic ideas about future city
Academic
ideas
are bolded
Peter Eisinger. “Detroit Futures:
Can the City Be Reimagined?” City & Community 14:2 June 2015.
“Many Detroit business and political leaders,
as well as many ordinary citizens, believe that the city can be restored to
vitality. At least four visions of the
future city animate their efforts: the city as a great international model
for green planning and technology leadership, the city as an entertainment
destination, the city as a metropolitan center, and the city as a pioneer
destination on the urban frontier. As these visions have simultaneously played
out, they have perhaps improved daily life in Detroit in the last decade, but
each is finally a partial and inadequate vision. None speaks directly to the
interests of the bulk of the city’s working class and poor population. Some of
the visions lack sufficient scale relative to the city’s problems, and some
cannot be realized for lack of resources. All of these visions finally
represent failures of city-building”;
Shahed Khan, Atiq Uz Zaman. “Future cities:
Conceptualizing the future based on a critical examination of existing notions
of cities” Cities 72 (2018) 217–225.
“Assigning
labels to cities that evoke
desirable features has become increasingly popular in recent years with city administrators
promoting various notions of the desired city. This article examines the
various labels used to classify cities and identifies
the key characteristics that each label tends to highlight. It is contended
that as proponents of variously labelled cities pursue certain aspects of
sustainability, their focus may be too narrow to cover the broad spectrum of
sustainability. A literature review of various notions of desirable cities promoted under various labels suggests that cities
of the future would need to be dynamic and intelligent in every aspect of
social, economic and environmental sustainability. Therefore, it is important
that all aspects of sustainability are considered in envisioning the desired future
in which to conceptualize the cities of the future. It can be assumed from the
past trends of urbanization that future cities will continue to uphold and
build upon common goals and values of existing cities such as promoting
pleasant urban form, community engagement, economic opportunities, and
technological advancement and cultural diversity”;
“The key
constituents of a city, which are people, infrastructure, institutions and
services, haven't changed significantly from the time of the ancient city of
Jericho developed nearly 9000 BCE near the Jordan River in the West Bank, to
the twenty first century city of Masdar initiated in 2006
near Abu Dhabi (Mark, 2014; Reiche, 2010)”;
“The increasing awareness of adverse effects
of infrastructure development
on the ecosystem that eventually affect
citizens' welfare will necessitate cross-sectoral
development approaches for future cities to assess and mitigate them.
Enhanced technological capacity to promote further synergies between the
natural and built environments will enable planners to seriously consider the
interrelationship of urban form with its environmental factors, promoting
closed-loop urban resource flows. Cities are most likely to pursue
industrial production systems that are restorative by design and promote
collaborative consumption practices”;
Ilaria Zambon, Pere Serra, Massimiliano
Bencardino, Margherita Carlucci & Luca Salvati (2017) Prefiguring a future
city: urban growth, spatial planning and the economic local context in
Catalonia, European Planning Studies, 25:10, 1797-1817, DOI: 10.1080/09654313.2017.1344193.
“Urban expansion has inevitably transformed urban and rural
landscapes, altering the spatial configuration of cities and regions, with
negative environmental and socio-economic consequences (Abelairas-Etxebarria
& Astorkiza, 2012; Almeida, Condessa, Pinto, & Ferreira, 2013; Camagni,
Gibelli, & Rigamonti, 2002; Petrov, Lavalle, & Kasanko, 2009)”;
“Trend
Impact Analysis (TIA) and Cross-Impact
Analysis (CIA) arewell known and largely used scenario planning methodologies
(Bradfield, Wright, Burt, Cairns, & Van Der Heijden, 2005). These
methodologies evolved out of the fact that traditional forecasting methods
relied on the extrapolation of historic data without considering the effects of
unprecedented future events. The concept of TIA and CIA involves four steps:
(i) historical urban data are collected; (ii) an algorithm is used to select
specific curve-fitting historical data and extrapolate this to generate ‘surprise-free’ future
trends; (iii) a list of unprecedented future events which could cause
deviations from the extrapolated trend is developed and (iv) expert judgements
are then used to identify the probability of occurrence of these unprecedented
events as a function of time and their expected impact, to produce adjusted
extrapolations. Specific land-use
approaches based on scenario-building
have been developed in recent decades (Dammers, 2010; Gantar & Golobic,
2015; Stewart, 2008). Their application covers issues such as land-use
planning, science and technology policy, organizational future-orientation and
societal challenges (Dufva, Könnölä, & Koivisto, 2015; Shearer, 2005; Xiang
& Clarke, 2003). They have several purposes: (i) to enrich the political
debate, highlighting future territorial challenges; (ii) to engage with
policy-makers in the identification of major priorities, providing integrated
decision support frameworks; (iii) to anticipate patterns and processes of
change and (iv) to foresee appropriate decisions, actions and policies (Silva
& Clarke, 2002; Uotila, Melkas, & Harmaakorpi, 2005;Wiek, Binder, &
Scholz, 2006). Moreover, these approaches assess the interaction between human
and natural environments with the objective of identifying causes, mechanisms
and consequences of land-use dynamics, such as urbanization (Chaudhuri &
Clarke, 2014)”;
